Laundry tips to help you get some free time back

Laundry, like death and taxes, is a certainty in life. While we might not have to scrub our clothes in a river or soak them in a tub with stale urine anymore, doing laundry can still be a time-consuming and often thankless task.

There are ways to make your laundry less of a load. We have several top tips to help you get some free time back into your life for the things you enjoy more.

Do less laundry, less often

Yes, it’s an obvious way to get some free time back, but have you actually tried it?

Make a commitment to yourself – and your family – that the washing machine will not go on unless there is a full load.

And only wash clothes when they really need it. Teenagers are renowned for putting clothes straight into the laundry basket just because they’ve tried something on, decided they don’t want to wear it and can’t be bothered to put it away again. Make sure this isn’t happening in your house! Unless you have babies or younger children, you’re unlikely to need to wash clothes after every wear.

Doing less laundry less often uses fewer resources. It’s not just water and electricity. It’ll reduce laundry detergent consumption which will reduce the financial cost and environmental impact of using it. Some manmade fibres made from recycled plastics shed plastic fibres that end up in the oceans. The less we wash these materials the better.

It might be counter-intuitive for the environment but wash your sheets and towels on 60°C. It’s necessary to kill bacteria and germs properly and that way they’ll need washing less often.

Inform, educate, and enlist your family

Let your family know you’ll be doing less washing, and why. If you’re the only person who does the laundry that needs to change. Unless your partner has an extremely valid excuse (we’re struggling to think of one, but they must exist), why can’t they take on some of the burden? As more people are working from home these days there’s really no excuse.

If you have children who are old enough to help, get them to. Teach them about the environmental and financial costs of washing clothes too often or running the machine when it’s half empty. Make them accountable.

Make sure your family understands the benefits of you having more free time and them having more responsibility for their own lives.

Organise your laundry around your life, not the other way round

If you work full time during the week, it might feel like you spend the whole weekend doing mountains of laundry. Or maybe you empty the laundry basket every day, or wash the kids’ school uniform every night.

Work out what causes you the most stress. Is it multiple loads of washing on one day or never getting a break?

Now that you’ve decided to wash less, less often and that you won’t be the only person using the washing machine you should be able to make a proper assessment of how to organise your laundry schedule.

School uniform doesn’t need to be washed every night. Hanging up towels after they’ve been used means they don’t start to smell and harbour germs so quickly. Maybe you can assign laundry duties to different days or family members. Maybe it’s quicker and easier to do it all on one day. You decide.

Use the right laundry detergent

Avoid traditional laundry detergents. You might have noticed a build-up of gunk in your washing machine. This can even end up on your clothes so they need washing again. Traditional laundry detergents don’t always fully dissolve and it’s this residue that gets left behind as gunk. As well as being annoying it can harbour germs and odours and even lead to the washing machine breaking down.

And then there are the chemicals that traditional laundry detergents use, as well as the plastic packaging and emissions from making and transporting them. It all ends up in the environment.

Melt laundry detergent strips are the future of laundry. They’re small, light, and delivered straight to your door. They’re available on a subscription basis and will save you even more time: you don’t have to go shopping for them and you need never run out. They dissolve completely, even in cold water, and won’t lead to residue building up. They contain natural enzymes and fragrance and use no plastic. They’re a zero-waste product.

What will you be doing with the free time you get back from laundry?